A Sparrow's Fall
by Jeitiiea
Summary: The Angels lay siege to the Gates of Hell and Castiel meets the righteous man.


For the first time in creation, there were Angels at the Gates of Hell.

It was an event to shatter the structure of reality. The immovable object had moved. For nigh on two thousand years, the Angels had kept themselves within their celestial palace, had not sullied their divine wings with the struggling, pain-wracked Earth. But for longer than that, far longer... in all the long stretching aeons of existence, never before had a single Angel with all his Grace, touched the merest outskirts of Hell itself. For those demons who had lived when Angels still walked the Earth, the memories had grown dim and faded. For those demons born in the intervening millennia, the tales of Angels were little more than myths, stories to frighten them into behaving. Or so they'd thought.

Angels had not left Heaven for two thousand years, the demons had assured themselves. Angels would not interfere in their plans. Earth belonged to the demons, to play with and despoil as they desired.

Except now, the Angels had come. From their far-away Heaven, they had come. Into the darkness, they had come. Not one, or two, or a dozen. They had come in strength, almost the entirety of the Host of Heaven had now amassed outside the Gates of Hell. The Celestial Host was not countless, not infinite... but their numbers and their strength was greater than even the oldest waking demons could recall. The Angels had come, with all their Grace-born majesty... to do war upon Hell at last.

The battles of angels and demons was not a physical thing. It struck deeper into the fabric of Creation than that. Just as Hell was not a great, gaping, cavernous pit of stygian darkness and screaming souls, though it could be perceived as such by the limited human soul. It was not a ravaging furnace of fire and brimstone, rent by the screams of its tortured victims, though it could be seen so by inferior human perceptions. Hell and Heaven – and demons and angels themselves – were not born of flesh or touch or physical form. Such things existed only on Earth, which was a place of mass and measurable, finite dimension. The celestial and the fallen domains were things of the spirit, and only creatures born to them could perceive them fully. To the doomed human souls who ended their journeys in Hell, it took whatever form their frail spirits could imagine.

But for the demons, the Fallen, who lived within the Pit, and for the Angels brimming with God's Grace, Hell could be seen as it truly was. A thing without limits, a labyrinth without shape or form, a gaping wound in creation carved of misery and cruelty, built on the bedrock of broken souls. A human could look upon the Gates of Hell, and see twisted wrought-iron fencing, and a thousand bleeding humans weeping as they lay chained to the walls of Hell. But that was only because their narrow, tiny souls could not perceive the horrific truth of Hell.

Those Gates, around which the Angels now lay siege, the Walls of Hell which they now attacked in full celestial fury... they did not hold broken humans chained to them, weeping and wailing. Those Gates were themselves made of the souls of those poor pitiless wretches: humans who had fallen to Hell, who had willingly given their souls to demons or been tricked into selling something they barely believed in for some fleeting material triumph. They were the faithless, who had turned from God, and their souls, their beings – the very essence of what they were – had been melted down in Hell's furnaces, and reforged into the insurmountable Gates of Hell. It was not bodies that clung and wept. It was souls, broken and trapped in misery for thousands of years, used to guard this place that began their misery. And so they suffered in weeping agony, fully aware of each instant that passed and utterly cognizant of the hopelessness of their suffering. In their despair, they suffered the punishment of the faithless.

This was the truth the Angels saw, but mercy for those pitiful souls did not stop the Host of Heaven in its advance. Their shining glory did not falter when the first Angel of the Lord laid his feet upon the shores of Hell and saw what Lucifer had wrought with his madness. Instead, they steeled themselves against the begging, shrieking, weeping souls that barred their way... and they attacked. For they were the faithless, the betrayers of God, and they deserved destruction.

The Host of Heaven did to those trapped souls what Hell itself had not. It destroyed them, utterly. It ripped them, rent them, hacked its way through the billions upon billions of souls that had kept Hell safe. Some would call it mercy to grant oblivion to those broken things. But it was not mercy or pity or kindness that motivated them.

The Angels had come for the righteous man, and no force in creation would turn them from their task. The Host of Heaven lay siege to Hell for what a human might feel was decades. It took all those many years to break through the sheer number of souls forged into Hell's walls. Souls taken from the beginning of human existence, to adorn and protect and guard Lucifer's domain. The Angels did not falter. They did not hesitate. The Army of God slaughtered and obliterated human souls without mercy or remorse, and the years rolled on. Souls bled and fell, the Gates of Hell staggered and crumbled but did not fall... and the years rolled on.

Until there came a year, a day, a moment, when all of Hell shook... if a place without form could shake... and a single note of pure sound rolled out from its centre, and crashed upon the rampaging Host of Heaven with brilliant, seething triumph. Then, and only then, did the Host of Heaven falter. Then, and only then, did the Army of God cease and hold still their weapons of Grace, coated in three decades of soul's blood.

"The First Seal is broken!" announced Zachariah, who led the Host in the name of God, expressly commanded by the Archangel Michael. The Celestial Host faltered as their divine will shook under the recognition of failure. Their holy Siege, these countless souls lost and broken, and still they had failed. They had failed God, had failed their beloved Father. A moan of mourning rose from the ranks of the aching Angels.

Yet Zachariah shone with the brilliance of triumph as his voice rolled through them, pouring over them with all the certainty of their Father's will. "It has begun! The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can end it!" he proclaimed, and the countless garrisons of Heaven drew strength from his certainty and his revelation. They allowed their moment of doubt to fall away, and the Angels of the Lord believed again. They had not failed, all was not lost. The righteous man had shed blood in Hell as had been foretold, and the First Seal had been broken. But there were 65 more seals to shatter; there would be other battles, and they would know triumph and victory. The righteous man must still be saved.

The Angels of the Lord again drew forth their Grace-born weapons and unleashed their storming fury onto the souls who barred the way into Hell.

Zachariah looked upon the Celestial Host and saw that one garrison fought with even greater dedication and zeal than the others. They alone had not faltered at the breaking of the Seal, their faith had endured.

"Castiel," called Zachariah, summoning the garrison's commander to him. Through it all, Castiel had held true, his strength and certainty of belief and the rightness of what they were doing, had led his garrison firmly in their efforts. Zachariah could not deny his pride in this brother who had kept faith above all others.

Castiel broke free of his fellow Angels, left the front lines to his brothers and sisters, and stood before the gleaming brilliance of Zachariah.

"What would you have of me, Zachariah?" inquired the angel Castiel somberly. Part of his attention remained ever on the battle, all too aware that his duty and his nature as a soldier called him back to the fight.

"The righteous man must be saved," Zachariah answered him. "We will break through the Gates for you, and you must find him and raise him back to the Earth."

There was a moment of silence from Castiel as he absorbed the unexpected task thrust upon him. He could point out that his duty commanded he lead his garrison, compelled him to fight beside his brothers. But challenging orders was not the celestial way.

Obedience. Blind, unthinking obedience. Absolute faith. Sublime loyalty to the cause and to Heaven and to God. That was the celestial way, and those who rebelled...

Well, the Gates of Hell stood as the result of one Angel's rebellion against the celestial order. They obeyed because it was their nature, not out of fear. So Castiel acquiesced instantly to his new orders, and assumed his new position at the front lines, ready to be the first un-Fallen Angel to step into Hell since its creation.

Time passed. For Angels, time was simply another perception, and Castiel stood quietly, patiently waiting. On occasion, he would turn to watch his brother Uriel, leading his garrison in his stead, and he would note with satisfaction their skill and strength. Uriel was his most skilled, most loyal brother. He would never falter in the cause. Castiel could not fear for his brothers with Uriel in charge.

Time passed. Castiel waited. The Angels battled on.

And then the moment came. They had all felt the First Seal gaping open beneath them, but it was nothing compared to the wrenching, distorting wail of the last twisting souls being mutilated. The high keening that rose and rose, spiralled upwards to a screaming crescendo that distorted gravity and light itself – and the Gates of Hell finally fell as the last soul wailed into oblivion, violated into full collapse by the triumphant Angels of the Lord.

Swift as quicksilver, Castiel moved; so fast, he was a blur of light. He did what no Angel had ever done in all of time and creation. He stepped into the stygian depths of Hell, with the full burning force of his Grace. It stretched behind him as he ran, opalescent and shining like the wings that was all most humans could perceive of his true self. Castiel strode into Hell, into its formless twisting labyrinth, and felt his brothers at his back. There was no form, no physical boundaries to navigate. Gravity gave no perception of up or down, light did not separate day from night. This was a broken shard of Creation, in which Castiel tasted of the darkness, of the seething mass of demons a heartbeat from charging to defend the Pit, of the billions of souls bound and breaking and broken. And he tasted of the tragedy that they were all – human and demon – here by their own choice. That they had all willingly abandoned their Father to serve time in Hell.

And even as he mourned for them, Castiel became aware that there – just _there_ – in this roiling mass of self-inflicted suffering, there was one light that shone with its own truth and grace.

The one soul in all of Hell who was there, not because he chose to be, but because of his own righteous sacrifice. Like their Lord, he had martyred himself to the cause, and he suffered for it. But through it all, and even through his breaking, under the layers of pain and hate and cruelty that now marked him, lay the soul of the righteous man.

It shone with a brilliance that surpassed even that of his brothers... they, who were born of God, who knew the glory of Heaven, and the all-encompassing love of their Father... Yet here was a soul that had known only hurt and fear and war for the entirety of his life. A soul that could so easily have fallen, surrendered to the despair and hopelessness. And instead, he had wrapped himself, his very essence, his being, his soul, so deeply around Love...

... and a word whispered to Castiel, a name shaped with that love...

... Sam...

... and in the end, he had sacrificed himself for that love.

Castiel knew the swift sting of surprise, as he drew deep of that bright-shining love and tasted an echo of his Father. The grace of God. The righteous man.

Castiel could not have kept away from that bright-shining soul even if the entirety of creation had depended on it. It pulled him, called to him, a beacon that rose to overshadow the wretched agony of Hell. This man's soul was a flame, and he a moth, dodging demons and darkness and all the traps of Hell, to draw ever closer to it.

Behind him, his brothers fought with their fallen brethren, but only the barest part of Castiel's divine awareness registered their battle to protect him in his search. Almost the entirety of the Angel's will and being was bent towards tracking the fierce-burning soul of the righteous man, guiding his formless self towards it. He angled through fractured worlds of depravity and humiliation, he inclined along pathways of cruelty and malice, he refracted along broken shards of torture and pain. And there, at the end, he found it – the light that led his race to find the one righteous soul in Hell.

Castiel could not yet know how this human soul perceived its time in Hell. To his celestial eyes, he saw it... a complex, coruscating thing of true beauty and loyalty and dedication and love... and hovering over it, he saw the black shade of a fallen brother, sucking eagerly with wet hunger at that flame. Castiel took this all in, in the instant he came upon them at last, and knew that the demon Alastair had been striving in desperate futility to consume this soul for some time. He may have broken its will and its hope, but he had never even come close to touching that true core of grace within it. Castiel saw this at a single glance, and he marvelled in awe that a human – so limited, so frail, so impaired – could have strength and devotion and love enough to resist this devastation.

And in the next instant, he was in motion. A luminous distortion within the gaping wound of Hell, Castiel flung himself at Alastair a bare heartbeat before those brothers closest to him caught up to join the fray. Castiel could not explain the madness of rage that came upon him as he wrenched Alastair free from the righteous soul, could not yet grasp the level of blind fury that consumed him at the obscenity of what he had seen. He struck with full force of that staggering wrath, and Alastair – greater demon of Hell – fell back under the onslaught. For a passage of time measured in less than a heartbeat, Castiel and Alastair did battle and the Angel's fury triumphed. Even as Alastair faltered and stumbled, Castiel's brothers drew upon them and fell upon the demon.

Castiel withdrew from the fray immediately, for they would have only moments. The seething mass of demons were storming closer, his brothers were falling around him as for the first time in millennia, the Host of Heaven clashed outright with the Denizens of Hell.

There was not much time. Castiel turned to the soul of the righteous man, and saw that it was bleeding – a thousand wounds both gaping and minor, weeping the blood of its essence. Castiel could not heal those wounds, they were things only time or their Heavenly Father himself could restore. There was only one thing Castiel could do to save this soul and its enduring light, and that was to follow his orders.

This Angel of the Lord stretched forth his hand, radiating with grace, and laid it gently upon the bleeding soul. And with the touch, the brilliant burning light of the soul turned supernova – it outshone the Host of Heaven and it swamped across Castiel's poor celestial self, and the Angel was undone. He tasted of the essence of the man, Dean Winchester, the righteous soul, and knew in every detail the truth of this strange being. His fears and hopes and dreams, his hidden secrets and insecure wishes, his agony and misery, his pain and his love, all the complex and contradictory battles that made up a being driven by free will.

Castiel knew this man, and it was good.

He was drowning in the beauty of the righteous soul, its shattering wilfulness and stubborn devotion, and surpassing loyalty, and Castiel knew for the first time why their Father had made humans. Because within them, they had the potential to become this... this brilliant, glorious thing that possessed both the freedom of will and self, and the shining grace of Heaven. He knew at last the true beauty of his Father's favourite children, that it was their ability to _choose_ this grace, that made them so miraculous. Angels were born of it, compelled to obey and in such, they had no choice. But humans... amazing, beautiful, astounding creatures that they were... had no such compulsion to love, and yet could choose it anyway.

Castiel felt himself changed, as if this soul and its shocking truth, had sunk deep into him as he gripped it tight. Sunk into his full celestial being, and marked it, and changed it forever in some tiny, inexplicable way. He would not know for some time, the truth of the changes within him. The new potential for doubt and questioning, the sweet contamination of free will to destroy his blind obedience. All Castiel knew as he gripped tight the soul of the righteous man, and raised it from perdition... was that he had found a miracle. And he did not wish to let it go.

As he raised the soul free of the grip of Hell, leaving his brothers to close ranks behind him and fight their way back out of Hell, Castiel laid his mark upon the soul in his protection. He cast his benediction softly over it, the gift of God's first children, and whispered an oath to the righteous soul. This man would live through his own breaking, and he would grow strong again. Castiel would make sure of it. For this soul, he would walk upon the Earth for the first time in two thousand years.

The return to Earth was explosive, and devastating – a blinding detonation of light and force that toppled trees and scorched the air. Like a magnet drawn to true north, the soul had pulled them free to Earth at the point of his physical remains. It was not surprising, such things had a gravity to them. The force and pull of weight and form that defined Earth dragged at them, left Castiel feeling wrenched in a thousand directions while the righteous soul in his care was drawn only in one. The soul ached for its flesh, craved its body. Castiel breathed life back into the withered bones and rotted flesh, pushed clean air into restored lungs and willed the heart to beat. And sweetly, gently, with infinite care, he laid the soul of the righteous man back into his flesh.

The man gasped to life – brutal return to awareness, heart skipping into overtime as he panicked and struck about to free himself. Castiel watched in silence as he drew himself free of his coffin and the earth, clawed himself back to life on the will to survive alone. A will of such strength that it had marked and changed an Angel of the Lord.

The Angel of the Lord smiled in quiet triumph, and his voice echoed across all of creation as he called to his brothers.

"Dean Winchester has been saved."


End file.
